February 24, 2012

I have the pleasure of introducing you to Janis Greve. We
met on, of all places, Twitter. She bought, read and loved (Re)Making Love: A Memoir. We decided to talk and talk we did. Our
minds and hearts met. Janis is writing a memoir and posting on her blog. She
writes the underbelly of her journey with cancer.

In humor and in pathos, Greve invents herself. Part of that
process must crush the self in order to reveal.

I offer in introduction, and for all who stop here to read
and consider the writing process, the wise words of writer, philosopher and
teacher Hélène Cixous:

Between the writer and his or her
family the question is always one of departing while remaining present, of
being absent while in full presence, of escaping, of abandon. It is both
utterly banal and the thing we don’t want to know or say. A writer has no
children; I have no children while I write. When I write I escape myself,
uproot myself, I am a virgin; I leave from within my own house and don’t
return. The moment I pick up my pen—a magical gesture—I forget all the people I
love; an hour later they are not born and I have never known them. Yet we do
return. But for the duration of the journey we are killers. (Not only when we
write, when we read too. Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a
part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is on the way to
writing.) —Hélène
Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of
Writing

Janis Greve is a professor
of autobiography and advisor of English majors at UMass Amherst. She’s written
and published both literary criticism and poetry, though presently she channels
her writing into her blog. Among the things that have
shaped her personhood, she has had breast cancer. She writes about this and the
tribulations of growing older as a woman, conveying, she hopes, some truthful
things.

Goodbye
Secrets, Goodbye Braby Janis Greve

I had no business shopping at Victoria’s Secret. After all,
I eschew their catalogues, the sexed-up models, the soft-porn poses luring young
women into seeing themselves as objects of male desire. The stores have always
seemed strangely discordant—all those impeccably trained, fresh-faced sales clerks
whose job it is to mother you, a middle-aged woman, into a new bra, fooling you
into believing that the pink and red lights and shelves of slinky panties were the
natural setting for such an undertaking.

Why, two years ago, I chose Victoria’s Secret for my new bra
I can’t quite say. I dislike driving that stretch of interstate to the mall—too
much merging just where the traffic thickens and the road bends right precipitously—so
I must have had some other purpose. Likely I was there to ransack H & M or
the sales racks at Macy’s, propelled to brave the highway—white-knuckled all
the way—by my perpetual craving for something new.

What I do know is that I
had my own secret. I had mixed feelings about sharing it with Victoria, who
already had one, or Janelle or Hillary or whoever attended me that day. In the
end, I didn’t have to. I was grateful for the discreet knocks and bras dangled through
the crack of a door that are the ritual of a bra-fitting, exhausting me in no
time with all the putting on and taking off and near-total dearth of anything without
an underwire except for something that came only in polka dots.

Since I
tried on so many bras, I lost all sense, and ended up choosing the marked-down
cotton bra, a big mistake, since it was really made of cardboard, which I
discovered only after I brought it home and wore it around some. But my secret
was still intact: my small, rippled implant, that misshapen twin of a breast
that is just the simple fact of me and the breast cancer I had. I’m not ashamed
of my implant, and I don’t exactly love it. It just didn’t seem right for
Victoria’s Secret, nor Victoria’s Secret for it.

A cardboard bra is intolerable, so back I went to the mall,
placing myself in the hands of another cool and unflappable attendant. This
time I succumbed to the ubiquitous underwire tyrannizing women’s lingerie stores
everywhere. Many in my life, including my own lovely and ample-breasted
daughter, have nudged me to take the underwire plunge. “Try it, you’ll like
it!” they said. “Don’t worry about the wire! You won’t feel a thing!” I was
doubtful. “Doesn’t it dig into your skin sometimes, like when you’re sitting on
the bed reading?” They’d looked at me strangely.

Maybe their breasts were already numb. Because the black,
underwire “Gorgeous” or “Incredible,” or whatever I got that day—the bra I
consign to the shabby, dark pockets of my closet floor—does just that. It digs.
Not all the time, but just enough to make the tender skin surrounding my
implant all the more tender.

Yes, there are special stores for women like me. Open the door,
a bell tinkles, and a clerk calls out to you kindly, asking if she can help. Calling
you honey, she settles you into a dressing room, then chooses a dozen
alternatives for a special-needs breast, grabbing pads that round out a cup
like a perfect hill, making no one the wiser for looking at you.

That’s how I think it goes,
anyway. I’ve never stepped into our local, much-touted lingerie store that makes
mastectomies a special niche because I can’t get past the Frederick’s of
Hollywood side-show in the window—all corsets, garters, and, just possibly, whips—rivaling
the self-esteaminess of Victoria’s Secret.

Even if I
hustled past those frights into the safer, maternal lap of the store, I’m not
sure I’d want all that attention—it’s too intimate. On top of that, I detest
padding: built-in or slipped into pockets, I don’t need to enter the world cushion-first.

As I lie on the examining table with my sweaters and
camisole bunched around my neck—no secrets here, nor ceremony, just straight-up
flesh—one of them will ask cheerily, in between probes, “Are you happy with
your implant?” I always feel incredulous. Happy? Does it matter? What part of
breast cancer was about my happiness?

They want me to be pleased with my purchase. I’m not pleased,
but I’m not displeased, either. I believe my surgeon did the best job she could
stuffing a pillow into a smaller-sized pillowcase. It was a very tight job, so much skin had been pared away in
small surgeries. I know she wanted to do better.

I was wrong when I said I didn’t quite love my breast. I
love it in precisely the way one loves a deformity, in precisely the way one
loves her own skin. What is a mastectomy, after all, but the hollowing of a
fruit—the pulp removed, the skin left intact? How can I not claim my skin, my kin,
my blameless, funny face?

Mostly I go braless now, which
is one of the perks of aging: my breasts have become smaller, more aerodynamic.
I’m enjoying a boyhood I never had. At night I shuck off my shirts as though I
were an ear of corn. It’s been liberating thumbing my nose at the brassiere
industry, that circus of pre-packaged notions, though sometimes a hand of cold air
slips up my shirt, making me shiver. I hate that. But it’s not the worst thing
in the world.You can visit Janis Greve at her blog Losing Farther